Many of the moves the Boston Red Sox have made on and off the field in recent years are not what you’d expect from a winning organization.
The latest example came Sunday when they traded the face of their franchise, Rafael Devers, to the San Francisco Giants for an underwhelming package of four players.
The Devers trade comes five years after the Red Sox traded another star in his prime — Mookie Betts — in a deal that looks worse by the day.
But trading away great players isn’t the only issue with the Red Sox right now.
Yahoo! Sports reporter Joon Lee joined NBC Sports Boston’s Arbella Early Edition on Tuesday and reported that the Red Sox used an AI bot to conduct interviews with a baseball operations job candidate.
“What’s happening with the Red Sox, with Sam Kennedy, with Craig Breslow, with Alex Cora, is a state of organizational dysfunction,” Lee said, as seen in the video player above. “I heard last night about an interview with — the Red Sox were trying to recruit a new person for their baseball operations department, and during this interview process, the entire interview was conducted with an AI bot, where you would record the answers to the questions and then the Red Sox would then evaluate them.
“And this wasn’t just one round. It wasn’t just two rounds. It was five rounds of interviews where this person did not talk to another person in the Red Sox organization.
“This source told me that he had also interviewed with the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Diego Padres. The Dodgers have kind of been the organization that the Red Sox have been trying to emulate for the last five years (in terms of) sustainability, a big market team that knows how to spend money at times, but also is able to develop young prospects, which they’ve done successfully over the course of the last decade.
“What he told me was that the gap between the field, the people skills of (Dodgers president of baseball ops) Andrew Friedman — who, obviously relies a lot on numbers dating back to his time in Tampa Bay — and what he dealt with with Craig Breslow was so far apart that it seemed like utterly delusional that the idea that this is what the Red Sox think the Dodgers are doing is just absolutely crazy.
“The gap between the two organizations and how they’re trying to function is just miles and worlds apart.”
Red Sox chief baseball officer Craig Breslow responded to Lee’s report on Wednesday (click the tweet below for his full answer):
Analytics and AI can be very helpful tools in building a winning organization, both on and off the field. It can help the franchise run more smoothly and efficiently. Some of the most successful teams in sports right now, including the Dodgers and the two-time defending Stanley Cup champion Florida Panthers, use analytics a lot.
But there also has to be a human element to the operation. Not everything is quantifiable through numbers. You have to learn about people on a human level and build a real working relationship with them.
You can’t do that through an AI bot.
So while the Red Sox are smart to use analytics, it can’t be too much of the equation. And, based on Lee’s reporting, the processes the Red Sox are using clearly need to undergo some dramatic changes.
If that doesn’t happen, it’s hard to imagine a world where the Red Sox are anywhere near as successful as the Dodgers moving forward.
